Harry Collins; Robert Evans. Rethinking Expertise .

Rethinking Expertise by Harry Collins; Robert Evans

Review by: By William T. Lynch
Isis, Vol. 100, No. 1 (March 2009), pp. 205-206
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
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 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009)
ception of approximation that has reference (but
not truth) and deidealization as its focal points.
Chakravartty’s book has clearly pushed the
realism debate one step forward. It explores new
ways to defend scientific realism, opens up the
issue of the connection between scientific real-
ism and metaphysics, and offers a sustained de-
fense of a thick metaphysical conception of the
world. It is a first-rate book. There is no doubt
that it will be read and reread by all those inter-
ested in the scientific realism debate.
DIMITRIS PAPAYANNAKOS
STATHIS PSILLOS
Harry Collins; Robert Evans. Rethinking Ex-
pertise. 160 pp., illus., figs., tables, bibl., index.
Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press,
2007. $29.99 (cloth).
While some have assumed that relativistic ap-
proaches in the sociology of scientific knowl-
edge eliminate any grounds for legitimating ex-
pert knowledge, Harry Collins and Robert
Evans argue that their program provides the
basis for a theory of expertise that distinguishes
expert from nonexpert judgment. In Rethinking
Expertise, a work directed primarily against the
concept of lay expertise developed by Brian
Wynne and Steven Epstein (as well as attribu-
tional or relational theories of knowledge com-
mon in constructivist approaches), limits are
placed on the ability of the public to judge the
knowledge produced by scientists. Beginning
from the assumption that knowledge is primarily
tacit, the authors argue that those who know
more than others can’t prove it, while those who
know less than others can’t judge them. Legiti-
mate discrimination flows downward from ex-
perts rather than upward from the public.
A corollary is that (tacit) knowledge is a real
entity that one either does or does not possess,
rather than an ability to pass as knowledgeable,
as many constructivists would argue. Knowl-
edge is about doing, not talking. Collins and
Evans suggest that a lesser form of expertise,
which they dub “interactional expertise”—the
province of journalists and science-studies eth-
nographers— can master the talk but that it
brings one no closer to walking the walk like
contributory experts, those who are actually spe-
cialists in a particular area. Collins’s own inter-
actional expertise in gravitational wave physics
is tested, by means of expert-judged quiz an-
swers, against the knowledge of other experts in
the field. The verdict? He can pass as an expert
at the level of discourse, though he cannot carry
out scientific work in practice. The tacit knowl-
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205
edge possessed by contributory experts is
viewed as a skill gained through practice; thus
the more hands-on experience, the better the
expert.
While the authors grant that experts need not
be credentialed if they have relevant practical
experience (in which case they have unrecog-
nized experience-based contributory expertise
rather than being “lay experts”) and deny that
scientists can speak authoritatively outside their
narrow field of expertise, their overall position is
that nonexperts need to defer epistemologically
to those who actually have contributory exper-
tise. How does one know who these experts are?
In principle, one could ask how much experi-
ence they have, but in practice knowing which
experts to defer to is itself something only the
core experts know. They possess tacit knowl-
edge of who has tacit knowledge, or “unspoken
understandings of who is to be trusted among
those who work in the esoteric core of the sci-
ence” (p. 20). The public (and journalists) who
bought into the mistaken view that vaccines
cause autism were duped by a charismatic sci-
entist who did not deserve credit. Similarly, pa-
tients who dig up health information on the
Internet, or even consult primary source medical
journals, can’t know who deserves to be read
and who ought to be ignored.
There is no doubt that Collins and Evans
capture something interesting about the self-
warranting nature of expert knowledge, but we
can question whether that is the best basis for a
normative theory of knowledge with empirical
foundations, which is what they seek. The fact
that experts consistently know whom to pay
attention to and whom to ignore may imply that
they are knowledgeable about who is in the
know, but it may also be that they are prejudiced
by their training, paradigm, or interests. Collins
and Evans, like Thomas Kuhn before them, take
the opposite lesson from the history and sociol-
ogy of science than some of their followers do.
Where many interpreted the fact that paradigms
channel inquiry in selected ways as prima facie
grounds for questioning the authoritative nature
of expert knowledge, Kuhn saw the limitations
of paradigms as self-imposed by scientists, who
would also know when to change paradigms.
Likewise, Collins and Evans see no applicable
outside perspective, since the form of life that
experts inhabit is truly understood only by other
participants.
In an interesting chapter where they use em-
pirical, Turing-style tests to distinguish active
participants in a form of life from those who
merely imitate, the authors show that color-
blind people are better able to simulate color
206 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 100 : 1 (2009)
knowledge in verbal interactions— having been
raised in a form of life where color knowledge is
pervasive—than the pitch-blind are able to pre-
tend knowledge among those who can perceive
perfect pitch. In essence, they develop an em-
pirical program for testing the limits of interac-
tional expertise, examining how far those who
don’t share practice in a form of life can pass as
functioning members.
Because they view knowledge as primarily
tacit knowledge, the authors’ normative focus is
on who possesses knowledge. Indeed, they
spend some time assessing how minimal a body
one needs in order to know, in a side dispute
with Hubert Dreyfus’s view that full embodi-
ment is necessary. By contrast, many sociolo-
gists might see knowledge in the first instance as
disembodied and socially distributed—in minds,
to be sure, but also in databases, books, journals,
institutional routines, interactional practices,
and the like. On this view, there might not be
any individuals who know, who can encapsulate
the knowledge gained in a domain. Knowledge
would tend to be alienated even from the con-
tributions of those who helped construct it. If
one followed Hegel rather than Polanyi, a quite
different normative evaluation of expert knowl-
edge would result.
WILLIAM T. LYNCH
Ronald N. Giere. Scientific Perspectivism. iv ⫹
151 pp., illus., index. Chicago/London: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2006. $30 (cloth).
Stephen H. Kellert; Helen E. Longino; C.
Kenneth Waters (Editors). Scientific Pluralism.
(Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Sci-
ence.) xxix ⫹ 248 pp., figs., tables, index.
Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota
Press, 2006. $50 (cloth).
The best introduction to Ronald Giere’s Scien-
tific Perspectivism is not the one in the book
itself. There he comes across as a Science Wars
peacemaker armed with a set of apparently time-
less isms—realism, naturalism, perspectivism.
Far better to start with a previous collection of
essays, Science without Laws (Chicago, 1999),
where the attractively dissenting character of
these isms is much more vivid. The dissent is
from the Logical Empiricism that reigned in the
American philosophy of science of Giere’s
youth. He calls on his philosophical colleagues
to liberate themselves (his verb) from Logical
Empiricism (his capitals) more fully than they
have so far. They need, for one thing, to drop the
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epistemic privileging of what humans happen to
be able to see unaided. An eyeball for Giere is
just an instrument for probing the world; knowl-
edge of something eyeballed is not magically
more secure knowledge than knowledge ac-
quired via other instruments, otherwise con-
structed. Here is his realism: we can know,
thanks to human-built instruments, about what
we cannot eyeball—the “unobserved.” More
provocatively, he wants philosophers to stop
treating science as a big logical/linguistic puz-
zle. No more papers on the raven paradox,
please. Philosophers interested in science should
take their interpretive tools not from the philos-
ophy of language but from science itself. Here is
his naturalism: the classiest source of insight
into natural science is that part of it that deals
with human social/cognitive activity, in its bio-
logical, psychological, and sociological dimen-
sions.
Perspectivism is Giere’s name for the idea
that scientific knowledge is always relative to a
point of view, a perspective. Eyeballs, human-
built instruments, and theories are all, Giere
suggests, perspective-defining systems. We use
them to probe the world, and, when we use them
well, we learn, up to a point, how the world
really is. Yet our probings are always limited by
the standpoints that our observational and theo-
retical instruments define. In Scientific Perspec-
tivism, Giere starts with eyeballs, specifically
color-detecting human ones. Surveying contem-
porary color science, he concludes that color as
normal humans perceive it arises from an inter-
action between what is in the world and what is
in our (contingently evolved, selectively sensi-
tive) heads. Next he discusses imaging technol-
ogies, with examples from cosmology and neu-
roscience. On the book’s cover, and replicated
within as one of twelve color plates, is a beau-
tiful color image of the Trifid Nebula. What the
image shows, we learn, is not how the Trifid
looks when viewed through a telescope on earth
or snapped on color film there, but what it would
look like if eyeballed from a suitable distance up
in space, without atmospheric interference. Pro-
ducing that image involved a complex proce-
dure, invented by James Clerk Maxwell and
updated by the photographer-astronomer David
Malin. The result is best described, in Giere’s
emphatic words, as “an observation of the Trifid
from the perspective provided by Malin’s three-
color process,” not simply as “an observation of
the Trifid” (p. 43).
The same sorts of qualifiers ought to tag
claims to theoretical knowledge, in Giere’s view
(and he is fully reflexive about this view on
views applying to his own). Even the best-